Women of War

by Alexander Potter

  She said nothing, waiting.

  “But I believe that Commander Allen might listen if you choose to make your request. These executions will not be popular with the men.”

  “Will we win this war?” She asked him. Because she could. Doubt, in the silence of her own space, was her own business.

  “Not without loss. Perhaps not without the loss that Duarte AKalakar envisions.”

  “You must know what he intends.” Because she did. And she had never been a woman who ascribed to the theory that the ends justified the means. Pragmatism warred with something else, and she knew that it might win. That it would be costly. How costly? Ah, that was the question. “If we lose,” she said, to herself, exposing all, “then all we will be are—”

  “Monsters.” She knew a moment of anger, then. But she had always been a pragmatic woman. An intuitive one. She understood everything that Duarte AKalakar offered her, and she had never expected that offer to come—if it came at all—from a mage.

  “Call the Duarte AKalakar back to my tent,” she told him quietly.

  Primus Duarte AKalakar faced the Kalakar, arms shorn of the weight of the dead in a way that he would never be. “This was her home,” he said at last. His words were bitter, but his voice was soft.

  After a moment, she nodded. “Yes. This was. She was never at home in the peace of Averalaan. Not after the war.”

  Because this was honest, because they were two officers alone, Duarte relented slightly. “Not before the war, either. She came looking for death. She didn’t much care whether it was her own.”

  “Only the first time,” the older woman whispered.

  Because this, too, was true, he said nothing.

  “I made you a promise.”

  He nodded, remembering it.

  Alexis Barton. The first name on the list of three. Fiara Glenn. Auralis, no family name given. It was to Alexis that he had gone first, and perhaps, had he chosen a different person, things would have unfolded in a different way.

  But he hadn’t.

  He had crossed the grounds trampled to mud by the boots of Imperial soldiers. Had listened to their whispers, their curses, their Weston phrases of anger. Even their songs, delivered in anger like a prayer to the god of war. Which god, which war, no longer seemed to matter. This, he expected.

  But Alexis? He could never have expected her.

  She was knife thin; the ocean passage had been unkind. Her skin was dark and red; it appeared that the sun had been unkind as well. But her face, like the face of a bird of prey, was bright-eyed, unhooded, and she met his gaze with contempt and defiance. She knew that the gallows were being built, alongside the stockade; could see the wooden beams, some too new in his opinion, as they were raised by ropes and battered into standing shape. She could even see the graves that they’d be granted: traitors’ graves, in foreign soil.

  Her hair was dark and lanky. What food she had been afforded remained, rotting in the sun; she had taken the water, no more. She had been stripped of rank—private, he thought—and the colors of the unit that she had come with. He knew the unit, or rather, could look it up; it was written beside her name.

  As was her crime.

  “Alexis Barton,” he said, as if he were calling roll. Her eyes narrowed. She’d been stripped of regulation weapons as well: short sword, daggers. He doubted she had the strength to pull a bow. But even without these, she was dangerous.

  “That’s my name,” she said, when it became clear he was waiting for an answer.

  “You stand accused of breaking the edicts of the kings.”

  She shrugged. “The Annies don’t read enough Weston to know the edicts.”

  “No. You understand that the civil treatment of prisoners is one of the things that differentiates us from the enemy?”

  She spit. “Not the only thing.” Her back was to the pen; she faced him, her knees beginning to bend.

  He lifted a hand, and fire flared in a bright ring around her feet. It was a warning. It was the only warning she would get. But her brows rose, and she chuckled. “They sent a mage?” She whistled. Low whistle.

  “You are not a member of the Kalakar House Guards,” he told her grimly. “But you are a member of the army under her command. Your behavior here reflects upon her. Do you understand this?”

  Her reply made clear that she did, and that it didn’t matter. He almost smiled. But the humor would be lost on this Alexis.

  “You served the kings,” he replied calmly.

  “Look where it got me.”

  “Could you do it again?”

  She stilled. She always stilled when she heard something worth listening to. “Any time.”

  “Your sentence will be held in abeyance, should you choose to serve,” he told her quietly.

  She looked at him as if he’d either sprouted another head or had started talking in Torra, the Annie tongue. “Abeyance? Big word.”

  “But not one with which you are unfamiliar.”

  She shrugged. “I’m familiar with a lot of words.”

  “I am Primus Duarte AKalakar,” he told her quietly. “And if you choose to accept my offer, you will be a private in my company. You will wear my colors, and the only law you will serve is my law.”

  “And what law is that?”

  “War’s law,” he replied grimly. “And the Kalakar’s.”

  “What about the kings?”

  “They’re not here.”

  “Then who do you serve?”

  “Commander AKalakar,” he replied. “Choose.”

  She shrugged. It was her way of saying yes. He knew it, and would come to know it better, in time. “If you do not prove useful, the gallows will still be your home.”

  She reached out and grabbed his hand. He almost burned her, but something held him back. “This isn’t our war,” she said, voice low. “It’s theirs. They called it. They made the rules.”

  “Yes,” he replied, tightening his hand; replying to her unexpected grip.

  Fiara Glenn had been more difficult. Her rage was harder to contain, and he had endured fifteen minutes of it before he cut her short. The offer he made was curt; he was under no illusion. Those that made their way to the gallows could not all be of use. Some, the gallows would claim. He could not be certain that she wouldn’t be one of them, and he chose—carefully—not to care.

  But when she found out that Alexis was his first private, she folded suddenly, the fire swallowed as she tried to remember basic discipline. He knew, then, that they were either friends or co-conspirators. Wasn’t certain if this was a good sign or not.

  And that left only Auralis. The man who would one day be known as the Bronze Osprey, with his bitter anger, his dark past, his desire for death. Duarte had seen men like him before; men who weren’t truly aware that the death they wanted was their own.

  Auralis had almost found it, and if he wasn’t at peace with it—and he wasn’t—he was almost unprepared to have it snatched away. He hadn’t spoken a word. Confronted by, confounded by, Duarte AKalakar, he had simply nodded, as if he had expected no less.

  “Where is Auralis?” the Kalakar asked, as Duarte sifted his way through memory, walking slowly.

  “I don’t know. With Kiriel.”

  The Kalakar said nothing. The memory through which he walked, she now walked, and it was just as tortuous a passage.

  By the end of the week, he had ten men and women in his service. They came from different units, and they were wary, ugly, angry. Only Cook was peaceful, although he had not yet earned that name; he was Jules from the Free Town of Morgan, and if he had a family name, he wasn’t sharing.

  Of the men, Cook had taken most easily to army life. His place upon the gallows had been secured by a berserk and terrible rage, one that took him in fits, and left him shaking, almost unaware of his surroundings. Shorn of this rage—as he so often was—he became an odd peace-broker. His size guaranteed his safety, but only barely. His fists did most of his talking otherwise, but wi
thout the rage to drive him, he never hit first. He almost always hit last. Cook was unique. He was humble in his acceptance of the offer of service over death.

  The rest?

  Given that they walked on the edge of certain death, and at that, at the hands of their own, it was hard to instill in them the respect due the kings’ army. Duarte didn’t bother to try; that respect would render them useless for his purposes.

  The Kalakar had come to visit.

  Duarte had not expected her, and was genuinely surprised when she interrupted his training run by the simple action of observing it. He was barely aware of her presence, but Auralis and Alexis stopped almost instantly, as if disturbed by the shadow she didn’t cast; the sun was high.

  He could still see her clearly as she was that day.

  “I know why you’re here,” she told them, taking up a sitting position on a large, round rock and crossing her arms. It would have been easy to mistake that comment, and many of his ten did. But Duarte looked at her carefully.

  “And I’ve come to tell you this: You serve me. I am Ellora AKalakar, Commander of the third army. You are the walking dead.” She had their attention. Held it. “You have committed crimes for which the kings’ military police would see you executed. Fair enough.

  “I believe you’re worth more than that. You are not a part of the kings’ army, upon this field. You are part of the Kalakar House Guard.”

  Duarte’s attention was riveted on her. When he had approached her, he had chosen caution; he had couched each phrase with care, so that she might have the opportunity, in the end, to disavow his small company.

  But it was not just his attention. The words Kalakar House Guard had a power, both within and outside of its ranks, that had not yet become myth. It was a near thing, though. Because it was known that Commander AKalakar’s House Guard was her family. The whole of it; she had no children, and had disavowed all ties of kin when she had chosen to take the House name. And she had done it gladly.

  “What you will be asked to do in the name of this war, only the gods know,” she continued. “But you will be asked it, and more, in my name. You will be AKalakar, and you will be counted as AKalakar.”

  Duarte closed his eyes.

  She rose. “There are three birds of prey upon this field. The Eagle, the Hawk and the Falcon. I offer you the unenviable position of becoming the fourth, fleet and small.” She gestured, and Verrus Korama came to stand beside her. He held a standard, which he unfurled before their eyes.

  It was not well made; there were few enough who could be spared for such endeavor. But it didn’t matter. Upon the field of kings’ Gray, wings stretched, claws extended, flew a black bird. Black Osprey.

  A whisper went up among his men, his women, these handful of criminals that had yet to become a working unit, if it ever would.

  “Your crimes are your own,” she told them. “And I will not ask you to detail them; they are your past. It is your present—and your future—that will define you. If you came to the Ospreys by the paths of the gallows, you have come, unknowing, to House Kalakar. If this war is to be won, we must alter its face; we must build our own legends, our own nightmares. Build as you must, and only as you must.

  “I demand service,” she added. “And loyalty. They are the only things I will ask of you; they are not the only things that will be asked of you. But serve me loyally from this point on, and that is all that will grace your service record at the end of this war.

  “You are mine,” she told them. “And if you have success in this war, you will be mine. I will not disavow you, and I will not desert you; all roads that lead to the gallows start—and end—with me.”

  She left the standard pole planted in the ground, and shored up by rock. She left without another word. But words followed in her wake.

  “House Guard? You take a risk,” Korama told her, when they were well away.

  “I have to,” she replied. She stared at her mailed hands; the sun was bright and unrelenting. “And if we take the risk, we take it openly. Duarte is no fool; what he needs from me, I can’t yet say. But I can give him what I can.” She paused, and then smiled grimly. “We need to let them hunt,” she said, seeing clear sky. “We need to learn to speak a different language.”

  War’s language. Death’s language.

  “You never did care about keeping your hands clean.”

  “Not much, no, but then again, I don’t have to. Some other poor bastard will be cleaning off the blood.”

  Not all of the men seconded to the unit were part of the third army, and this caused strife almost instantly. Devran ABerrilya surrendered none of his dead, but Commander Allen chose to trust the instincts of Commander AKalakar, and in the weeks that followed, more men and women, execution papers unsigned, were taken from the shadows of the gallows.

  Some of the men, Duarte almost rejected out of hand. He read their records, and he understood that he could make no easy use of them. But one use did suggest itself, and in the end, with reservations, he accepted them.

  The raids upon the supply lines had been ferocious, and worse, the Annies were burning their own stockades as they anticipated lost ground. Food, always an issue with an army of any size, was in scant supply, and the heat of the Southern summer, drier than the season that graced Averalaan, made men mad.

  The colors of the Black Ospreys were stitched upon surcoats that had been grudgingly surrendered by quartermasters across the encampment in ones and twos. Armor was returned to the Ospreys, and with it, weapons. Their attitude hovered between surprise and arrogance. He expected no less.

  It was his duty to train them; his training was difficult. He had learned enough magery in the Order of Knowledge to test their reflexes; to test their ability to move silently and without detection. He was not a kind taskmaster, but he didn’t have to be; popularity was not his concern.

  Fear was. Fear could either make a man very smart or very stupid.

  Alexis AKalakar was not a man. And she was not afraid. Not of Duarte, and not of the commander. She offered him the respect due his rank—but it was an ungainly, imperfect respect. The Ospreys had not been chosen for their ability to dress well.

  When they numbered fifty-five, he began to teach them the shorthand that would become their silent language; it was almost the language of thieves. It was certainly the language of assassins. They took to it as well as the uneducated could be expected to: very.

  “This is a lot of training for not a lot of work.”

  He looked up from the paper he was examining. They were, as always, writs of execution. Without replying, he handed them to Alexis. He couldn’t have said why, had she asked. But she was Alexis. She didn’t. Instead, she took them. Leafed through them, her dark eyes focused, flicking over the sparse lines that described crimes, names, units.

  “AKalakars?” She asked him, when she had finished. It hadn’t taken her all that long. He wondered, for the first time, what she had been in her life before the army. When she had joined. Although the army had always been open to women, few indeed were those who picked up sword and stood in recruiting lines.

  “AKalakar,” He replied. “And Commander Allen’s. Commander ABerrilya will send us nothing.”

  She shrugged. “Given his reputation, it’s probably just as well.”

  It surprised him. “Why are you here, private?”

  “To pass along a bit of friendly advice.” Her expression was at odds with the word friendly. Her voice was thin edge.

  He nodded slowly.

  “Keep an eye on Kreegar.”

  He nodded again.

  She set aside five of the writs. “These,” she told him quietly.

  “You know them?”

  “One of them. But I’d take a risk on the rest.”

  “The others?”

  “Fiara will kill at least two of them.”

  “If she does, she’s dead.”

  Alexis smiled grimly. It was the only way she smiled, but it changed the la
ndscape of her face. “I know.” She turned from the tent, stopped, bent slightly, in its flaps. “But Fiara, you can trust.”

  He almost laughed. “Not a single one of you could follow the orders you were given, not even when it meant your death otherwise.”

  “Maybe we didn’t like the orders.” She shrugged. “Take’em if you want. Fiara can look out for herself.”

  He stared at the papers for a long time, musing. In the end, he kept five.

  Where food was scant, alcohol was less so. It was a mystery to Duarte, who seldom drank; a mystery and a great annoyance. The first time, he chose to overlook it. Two men were sent to the infirmary with wounds that would render them useless for at least two weeks. The second time?

  He shed his forced nonchalance. Drinking after battle was a time-honored tradition. Drinking right before it, time-honored as well. But this?

  He found the men—and woman—who were drinking, and he set the alcohol alight. There were cries of surprise and pain as bottles dropped and cracked, some shattering where they hit the sparse rock along the plateau. Alcohol made men brave.

  And stupid. Terribly stupid.

  One, scarred, ugly in ways that had nothing at all to do with appearance, took exception to his loss. He recognized the man: Kreegar. Alexis’ gift. His dagger glinted in the dying blue fire as he rose swiftly, his Weston a smattering of words that would make street thieves proud.

  Duarte, dressed in the finery of a Primus of the Kalakar House Guards, lifted a brow. “Put it down,” he said quietly. It was clearly not a request.

  Kreegar swore. He wasn’t drunk enough to stumble; he certainly wasn’t drunk enough to slur his words. Just enough to be foolish.

  He lunged at Duarte, who didn’t bother to move.

  In all, the Kalakar Primus was underimpressed. They had trained with him. They should be aware of what he could do, by now. Of course, they hadn’t seen it all. He was their Captain, Primus Duarte of the Kalakar House Guards. He was also their last jailer.

  He used fire that would have been almost pathetic among the Warrior mages of the Order of Knowledge, seconded to the kings. And while the fire burned, and Kreegar screamed, he stepped in with his sword. It was not his favored weapon. Favored or no, it did its work. It passed through Kreegar’s chest with unerring accuracy.